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I think a lot of commenters here have little experience with hyper-converged infrastructure if they don't see this is different. This looks, by far, the simples

I think a lot of commenters here have little experience with hyper-converged infrastructure if they don't see this is different. This looks, by far, the simplest way to run workloads outside of the big cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP). It seems they only support up to virtual machines but this is still miles ahead of VMWare, Nutanix, or CISCO ACI to my eyes. This honestly looks simple enough that a developer/DevOps team could manage it. With the other 'hyperconverged' infrastructure offerings you will still need a dedicated team of trained ops professionals to manage it.

layer8 3y ago
It may be a limited market. You need to be large enough for a private cloud to make sense, but above a certain size it also should be a no-brainer to have a competent ops team making you less dependent on a singular infrastructure provider.
- dmix 3y ago
  Maybe 37signals type businesses, SMB tech startups with a serious, stable, non-high growth business model and a tech savvy team. If you're selling $500k boxes you don't need to sell a TON of them to make a hundred million dollar business. Unless their VCs expect Oxide to be a billion dollar company with a broader market.
  - ksec 3y ago
    Exactly what I was thinking. Since they are also getting out of the cloud. Although I am not too sure if DHH will play well with Bryan.
  - whizzter 3y ago
    With 44m in financing they probably expect a billion dollar company. https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-unveils-the-worlds-first-commercial-cloud-computer https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-unveils-the-worlds-first-c...
- Nilithus 3y ago
  Perhaps this changes the calculus. If you don't need as much of an ops team to go private cloud. Then you might not need to be as large before it makes sense.
  - layer8 3y ago
    By a private cloud making sense, I mean the lower bound for being an Oxide customer, i.e. having the budget to buy the infrastructure with enough headroom for usage spikes and expected near-term growth. The reasons why you otherwise would go public cloud when you’re still small. The reduced need for an ops team with Oxide was already factored in.
    - novok 3y ago
      So uber did private cloud, then went to public cloud recently because the balance was not worth it ( and they probably had enough scale to negotiate a good price, like netflix ) . If they were on something like oxide which reduced infra management costs a lot staffing wise and negotiated a bulk deal, would’ve they gone the public cloud route?
- Guvante 3y ago
  The hardware only lasts five years at most. That means you have a decent cadence of repurchases.
tryauuum 3y ago
I hate all the big clouds and never use them. Yet it was hard to me to get their selling point, I had to read like for 2 minutes
parasubvert 3y ago
I have a lot of experience with hyper-converged infrastructure. "Miles ahead" how? Oxide's control plane barely competes on basic functionality that OpenStack had 13 years ago, let alone VMware which is miles ahead of OpenStack. The hope is that the simplicity in hardware and network/storage/compute architecture will drive dividends as they improve their control plane software. I don't discount that it's a great achievement towards simplicity in the racking approach for rack-scale use cases (having lived through Dell VxRack's nonsense), but let's not kid ourselves that any DevOps team could manage this - do they understand BGP peering? Three phase power requirements? Cooling? ZFS? How about basic maintenance migrations ala Vmotion or DRS? (kidding! they can't do it) If you don't think Oxide will require an ops team, you may be wish projecting.
omneity 3y ago
This point is understated. One of the main reasons cloud is so attractive to executives is the smaller devops footprint compared to a traditional on-premise deployment. A solution as lightweight on operations as Oxide challenges this premise at its core and assuming the capex is not outrageously high, it might suddenly get very attractive.
fishtoaster 3y ago
> This honestly looks simple enough that a developer/DevOps team could manage it. With the other 'hyperconverged' infrastructure offerings you will still need a dedicated team of trained ops professionals to manage it. That seems like the best explanation of the value here I've heard so far! I could definitely see a number of SMBs whose use cases are expensive in AWS/etc and would be a good fit for a few racks in a datacenter, but who don't want the cost of a team to manage them. If this significantly lowers the skill threshold necessary to run servers in a datacenter, I could see that being a huge value prop.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

layer8 3y ago

It may be a limited market. You need to be large enough for a private cloud to make sense, but above a certain size it also should be a no-brainer to have a competent ops team making you less dependent on a singular infrastructure provider.

dmix 3y ago
Maybe 37signals type businesses, SMB tech startups with a serious, stable, non-high growth business model and a tech savvy team. If you're selling $500k boxes you don't need to sell a TON of them to make a hundred million dollar business. Unless their VCs expect Oxide to be a billion dollar company with a broader market.
- ksec 3y ago
  Exactly what I was thinking. Since they are also getting out of the cloud. Although I am not too sure if DHH will play well with Bryan.
- whizzter 3y ago
  With 44m in financing they probably expect a billion dollar company. https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-unveils-the-worlds-first-commercial-cloud-computer https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-unveils-the-worlds-first-c...
Nilithus 3y ago
Perhaps this changes the calculus. If you don't need as much of an ops team to go private cloud. Then you might not need to be as large before it makes sense.
- layer8 3y ago
  By a private cloud making sense, I mean the lower bound for being an Oxide customer, i.e. having the budget to buy the infrastructure with enough headroom for usage spikes and expected near-term growth. The reasons why you otherwise would go public cloud when you’re still small. The reduced need for an ops team with Oxide was already factored in.
  - novok 3y ago
    So uber did private cloud, then went to public cloud recently because the balance was not worth it ( and they probably had enough scale to negotiate a good price, like netflix ) . If they were on something like oxide which reduced infra management costs a lot staffing wise and negotiated a bulk deal, would’ve they gone the public cloud route?
Guvante 3y ago
The hardware only lasts five years at most. That means you have a decent cadence of repurchases.

tryauuum 3y ago

I hate all the big clouds and never use them. Yet it was hard to me to get their selling point, I had to read like for 2 minutes

parasubvert 3y ago

I have a lot of experience with hyper-converged infrastructure. "Miles ahead" how? Oxide's control plane barely competes on basic functionality that OpenStack had 13 years ago, let alone VMware which is miles ahead of OpenStack. The hope is that the simplicity in hardware and network/storage/compute architecture will drive dividends as they improve their control plane software. I don't discount that it's a great achievement towards simplicity in the racking approach for rack-scale use cases (having lived through Dell VxRack's nonsense), but let's not kid ourselves that any DevOps team could manage this - do they understand BGP peering? Three phase power requirements? Cooling? ZFS? How about basic maintenance migrations ala Vmotion or DRS? (kidding! they can't do it) If you don't think Oxide will require an ops team, you may be wish projecting.

omneity 3y ago

This point is understated. One of the main reasons cloud is so attractive to executives is the smaller devops footprint compared to a traditional on-premise deployment. A solution as lightweight on operations as Oxide challenges this premise at its core and assuming the capex is not outrageously high, it might suddenly get very attractive.

fishtoaster 3y ago

> This honestly looks simple enough that a developer/DevOps team could manage it. With the other 'hyperconverged' infrastructure offerings you will still need a dedicated team of trained ops professionals to manage it. That seems like the best explanation of the value here I've heard so far! I could definitely see a number of SMBs whose use cases are expensive in AWS/etc and would be a good fit for a few racks in a datacenter, but who don't want the cost of a team to manage them. If this significantly lowers the skill threshold necessary to run servers in a datacenter, I could see that being a huge value prop.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]